Sunday, January 29, 2012

Give and Take: This Week in the Book Pages

Perusing this week's book pages, Olivier Zunz's Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton University Press) stood out to me as particularly interesting. Pablo Eisenberg's review, for the Nation, describes the book as "sweeping" and "insightful." The book "trace[s] the evolution of American philanthropy over the past 150 years," focusing specifically on philanthrophists' efforts to "influence and change national policies in the realms of science, education, health, economic development and anti-poverty programs." Read on here.

This week in the New York Times, you'll find a review of Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (New York University Press), by Marni Davis. Underneath the "beguiling title," writes reviewer Sam Roberts, is "a thoughtful, instructive and often insightful dissertation that is much drier than it needs to be." Here's a taste:

Prohibition presented a dilemma. “Should Jews insist on ‘special rights’ for the sake of their own historical continuity, or break with the past for the sake of assimilation?” That dilemma, Davis writes, meant that “in the years leading up to and during national Prohibition, Jews who made a living selling liquor, or who defended alcohol’s legal availability, unwittingly acted as flash points for American anxieties about immigration and ­capitalism.”

They say that history is stranger than fiction. Keith Heyer Meldahl says that geology, is too. Check out a review of his new book, on the formation of the American West (Rough-Hewn Land), in this week's Los Angeles Times, here.